Troubleshooting

Most CorriDraw issues fall into one of seven buckets. This page is the playbook the support team works from — try the steps for your symptom in order and you'll resolve the problem yourself in nine cases out of ten. If you're still stuck after the last step in a bucket, the final paragraph there points at where to escalate.

The editor is stuck on the loading splash

Symptom: the gradient splash with the wiggle logo never goes away. The toolbar never appears. The browser's DevTools show pending requests or an error in the console. Almost always a service-worker / cache problem after a deploy:

1. Hard-reload the page — hold Shift while clicking the browser's reload button. If a new service worker is waiting, this activates it.
2. If that doesn't work, open the browser's DevTools (right-click the page and choose Inspect, or open it from the browser menu under More tools → Developer tools), go to Application → Service Workers, and click Unregister on the corridraw.com worker, then reload.
3. Still stuck? In the same DevTools panel, go to Application → Storage and click Clear site data. Note: this wipes any guest-mode diagram you haven't saved to the server yet — sign in first if you have unsaved local work.
4. Try a private/incognito window. If it loads there, you have a third-party extension interfering — disable extensions one at a time to find the culprit.

If a clean profile in incognito still hangs, the problem is server-side. Check status.corridraw.com for an active incident, then post in corri/help with your browser, OS, and the failing request URL from the Network tab in DevTools.

"Can't connect to collab" / live cursors disappear

Symptom: the multi-user board you opened two minutes ago shows a red "Disconnected" pill in the top bar; cursors of other people freeze; your edits stop reaching them. The collab websocket has dropped.

1. Click the red pill — it triggers an immediate reconnect attempt. Watch for a green "Connected" badge.
2. Check your network. Mobile hotspots and aggressive corporate proxies often block long-lived websockets. Switch to a different network to rule that out.
3. Make sure the URL still has the #room=…&key=… fragment. If a tab history navigation has stripped it, the page is no longer in a collab session and you'll need a fresh link from the host.
4. If your edits go through but you can't see anyone else, the other side may have lost connection — ask them to refresh.

The mechanics behind these signals are explained in Live cursors & follow mode. If reconnection keeps failing, the websocket service is the likely culprit — escalate to support with a HAR file and the timestamps where the drops happen.

Offline edits aren't syncing once I'm back online

Symptom: you drew on the train, came back to the office, the editor reconnected, and… your train edits are missing on the server (or appear as duplicates). The offline-merge layer should reconcile both sides automatically, but a few things can break it.

1. Don't close the tab while the top bar still says "Syncing offline edits". Wait for the "All changes saved" pill before navigating away.
2. If you opened the same diagram in two tabs while offline, only one tab's edits will land cleanly — the other tab's queue is treated as a divergent branch and surfaces a small "Conflicting edits" notice. Click Show diff in the notice and pick which side wins element-by-element.
3. If the sync indicator is stuck on "Syncing…" for more than a minute, your client has queued more edits than the server is willing to accept in one batch. Refresh the page — the offline queue is keyed by browser session, so the queue is preserved through reload.
4. If you've signed out and back in while offline edits were queued, the queue is dropped (it was scoped to the previous session). Always sign in first on a fresh device.

The full reconciliation model is documented in Offline & merge.

The exported PNG looks blurry

Symptom: you exported your diagram, dropped it in a slide deck or a PDF, and the lines look fuzzy at full size. PNG is a raster format — the export dialog has settings that control sharpness and they default conservatively.

1. Open the hamburger menu (top-left) and click Export image… — or click the Export button on the top bar — and look at the Scale selector. The default is 1×; bump to 2× or 3× before exporting. The output file gets larger but every line stays crisp at full resolution. (Pro tip: Ctrl+Shift+E opens the same dialog.)
2. For anything you'll project, print, or zoom into, export SVG instead. SVG is vector — it stays sharp at any size. Most slide tools (Google Slides, PowerPoint 365, Keynote) accept SVG natively.
3. Check the Background toggle. A transparent PNG anti-aliases lines against transparent pixels, which can read as fuzzy on dark backgrounds. Export with the background color baked in if you know what you're placing it on.
4. If the editor itself looks fuzzy on a high-DPI display, that's a different problem — open the browser's view menu and reset the page zoom to 100%, and double-check the OS display scaling is set correctly.

Full export-format details live in Export formats.

I cleared my browser storage and lost work

Symptom: you cleared cookies and site data (or used a "Clear browsing data" sweep), and your diagram's gone. This one is genuinely painful, and recovery depends on whether you were signed in:

• Signed in — open /diagrams. Every save you made while signed in is on the server. The dashboard also keeps version history per diagram, accessible from the diagram's History tab — see Save & version history.
• Guest mode — local-storage-only. There is no server backup. Check the OS file system for any .corridraw files you've manually exported via File → Save. If you never exported, the work is unrecoverable.

To prevent this happening again, sign in once and let the cloud sync run. The Continue without account mode is great for trying the editor, but it's not a backup strategy.

"AI rate-limited" or Magic Frame returns an error

Symptom: clicking Generate in Magic Frame or the AI panel produces a yellow "Rate-limited" toast, or a red error mentioning quotas. The AI features sit behind per-user rate limits to keep the inference budget sane.

1. Wait two to three minutes. The window is sliding — short bursts that hit the cap recover quickly.
2. Trim the prompt. Very long prompts (> 2,000 characters) cost more per call and count against the limit harder. Aim for one clear paragraph.
3. Make sure you're signed in. Anonymous calls have a much tighter cap than authenticated ones.
4. Check the AI status row at the bottom of the AI panel. If the upstream provider has an incident (the row shows Provider degraded), wait for it to clear instead of retrying — every retry counts.

The full breakdown — including which features hit which provider, and how to bring your own key — is in AI troubleshooting.

An embedded URL doesn't render on the canvas

Symptom: you dropped a Figma, YouTube, GitHub, or arbitrary URL onto the canvas to make an embed and the tile shows a blank rectangle, a "Refused to display" message, or just the URL as text. Browsers and the embedded sites both have a say in whether the iframe loads.

1. Check whether the source supports embedding at all. Many sites set X-Frame-Options: DENY or a strict Content-Security-Policy that forbids iframing — there's nothing the editor can do about that. Use the embed's official "share / embed" URL where one exists (e.g. YouTube's /embed/ path, Figma's /embed share link).
2. Make sure the URL is HTTPS. Mixed-content (an HTTP iframe on an HTTPS page) is blocked by every modern browser.
3. Some embeds need a free or paid account on the source site to render. Open the URL in a private window — if it asks for a login there too, you'll need to be signed in on the same browser profile that has CorriDraw open.
4. Browser extensions (privacy blockers, ad blockers) often nuke embeds wholesale. Allow iframes on corridraw.com or test in a clean profile to confirm.

Which sources are first-class supported, and how the parsing of their share URLs works, lives in Embeds on the canvas.

Screenshot pending

The editor's connection-status pill in the top bar in three states side-by-side: a green 'Connected' pill, a yellow 'Reconnecting…' pill with a small spinner, and a red 'Disconnected' pill.

/screenshots/docs/troubleshooting-1.png

Still stuck?

If none of the above fixes your issue, the fastest way to unblock yourself is a thread on corri/help with these four pieces of information:

1. What you tried to do (one sentence).
2. What happened instead (one sentence + a screenshot if anything visible was wrong).
3. Browser, OS, and CorriDraw build (the build hash is in the bottom-right of corridraw.com on a hover).
4. Anything in the browser's DevTools Console tab that looks like a red error — open DevTools by right-clicking the page and choosing Inspect, then click the Console tab.

For data loss, billing, or anything you'd rather not post publicly, email support instead — the team reads that queue every business day.